Aah, I see. I think one of the Servo City pan-tilt platforms would work very nicely for that. The only downside to using servos to directly drive your pan-tilt platform is that you only get 180 degrees of motion on each axis. If you want compact absolute position control, a hobby servo platform is by far the simplest way to go.
What you need in addition to the motorized pan/tilt platform is a way to control the servos, and two ways to do this jump out at me.
If you want the flexibility to write new motion sequences while you’re out in the field, you could bring a laptop with a serial radio, and have it send commands to a receiver, which you could connect to a micro serial servo controller. The Pololu servo control protocol has a speed control option, so you would essentially be commanding new positions to the servo motors and how fast to travel there.
If you’re okay with picking from a set of pre-programmed motion sequences, you could program a Baby Orangutan to generate the servo signals directly (it’s nice to have a dedicated controller for lots of servos, since the signals are all about timing, but its pretty trivial for one or two servos). There are a couple of ways you could remote control the Orangutan (serial radios, with a laptop or another microcontroller on the other end), but if you’re just picking from one of several preprogrammed sequences you also just wire up a couple of buttons to select from these sequences, and a long delay to let you get out of the way.
For the couple of extra bucks, I would go with one of the ATMega168 based controllers to have ample room to store lots and lots of motion sequences. A Baby Orangutan will fit in a 1" diameter pipe, but you might even want to go with a big Orangutan, which has an LCD screen and built-in buttons, so you could set it up to scroll through named sequences and tell you what you’re doing. Both of these are available as combos with programmers.
Any of this sound good?
-Adam
P.S. Have you taken a look at Phil’s Panobot thread? He built a larger pan/tilt rig for taking panoramic photos with a still camera, and it turned out very well (I know of at least two people who are duplicating the project).